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120 seventeen The Brown Team Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. —Margaret Mead In January 1950 I walked into the conference room of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., on West 40th Street in Manhattan. We sometimes called it the “Inc” Fund. Some faces were familiar and some were not, but over the next five years I came to know the most dedicated, energetic, and innovative group of people whom I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. Many went on to extraordinary careers as judges, law school deans, and practicing lawyers, where they continue to improve the nation’s laws. Like Marshall, Robert Lee Carter had graduated from Lincoln University and had been a star pupil at Howard Law School under the tutelage of Hastie and Houston before receiving a master of law degree at Columbia. Carter came to the LDF in 1944, at the age of twenty-seven, after a career in the Army Air Corps, where he’d been a troublemaker, fighting racial discrimination and segregation at every turn. He became Marshall’s deputy and ran the staff with an iron fist, making sure that court deadlines were met and freeing up Marshall to travel the country. He was more radical than most of his colleagues and was more interested in results than theoretical strategizing. Carter was the lead attorney in the Topeka school desegregation case, one of the five cases that were consolidated for argument in Brown v. Board of Education. He later served as general counsel of the NAACP under Roy Wilkins and, even though a Democrat, was appointed by President Nixon as a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York. In 2007 New Jersey named its state education building after Judge Carter. In the 1950s Carter and Marshall were an effective duo, complementing each other in skill and temperament, although they later went their separate ways. Spottswood W. Robinson III was also a Howard Law School graduate and a student of Houston’s and Hastie’s. He and his law partner, Oliver W. Hill 03-0488-1 part3.indd 120 9/9/10 8:28 PM The Brown Team / 121 Jr., were in charge of the Virginia school desegregation cases. Robinson later became the dean of Howard Law School and was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where he became its chief judge. Robinson was Marshall’s cerebral soul mate, a pragmatic strategist, a graceful writer, and a smooth oral advocate. He was respected for his mastery of the record and responsiveness to judicial interrogation, even by unsympathetic southern judges. The tall, balding Oliver Hill had been a classmate of Thurgood Marshall, with whom he had competed for first place. Fiercely competitive and focused, he was a skillful trial lawyer and was the first person of color to serve on the Richmond, Virginia, city council.1 He lived to the age of 100 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Virginia named its Court of Appeals building after him. Constance Baker Motley, a graduate of Columbia Law School, had passed the bar a couple of years earlier and joined the LDF as its expert on housing issues. Quiet but tenacious, she earned the respect of her male compatriots for her persistent advocacy. As a woman of color, Motley had her own quiet battles in the mostly male macho atmosphere of the civil rights warriors. She later became U.S. district court judge for the Southern District of New York, and was eventually appointed its chief judge.2 One of the few white faces around the table was that of Jack Greenberg, a twenty-five-year-old lawyer just out of Columbia Law School. After many years as director-counsel of the LDF, Greenberg became dean of the College of Columbia University.3 Robert R. Ming Jr. was a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and a member of its law review. He practiced law for the government and in a private firm, was a professor of law at Howard for ten years, and later taught at the University of Chicago. An excellent writer, he drafted many of the key briefs. James M. Nabrit Jr., who had grown up in poverty in southwestern Georgia , worked his way through Northwestern Law School, graduating at the top of his class as an...

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